The Answer My Friend Id
Blowing (No Clipped “G”) In The Wind-The Influence Of Bob Dylan’s “The Times
They Are A-Changin’” On The “Generation of’68”-The Best Part Of That Cohort
[An encore of two pieces on this subject and like the Summer of Love, 1967 frenzy at this publication, time to move on and let others give their choices without further prompting. S.G. ]
By Seth Garth
No question this
publication both in its former hard copy editions and now more so in the
on-line editions as the, ouch, 50th anniversary of many signature
events for the “Generation of ‘68” have come and gone that the whole period of
the 1950s and 1960s had gotten a full airing. Has been dissected, deflected,
inspected, reflected and even rejected beyond compare. That is not to say that this
trend won’t continue if for no other reason that the demographics and actual
readership response indicate that people still have a desire to not forget
their pasts, their youth.
(Under the new site manager
Greg Green, despite what I consider all good sense having worked under
taskmaster Allan Jackson, we are encouraged to give this blessed readership
some inside dope, no, no that kind, about how things are run these days in an
on-line publication. With that okay in mind there was a huge controversy that
put the last sentence in the above paragraph in some perspective recently when Greg
for whatever ill-begotten reason thought that he would try to draw in younger
audiences by catering to their predilections-for comic book character movies,
video games, graphic novels and trendy music and got nothing but serious
blow-back from those who have supported this publication financially and
otherwise both in hard copy times and now on-line. What that means as the target
demographic fades is another question and maybe one for a future generation who
might take over the operation. Or perhaps like many operations this one will
not outlast its creators- and their purposes.)
Today’s 1960s question, a
question that I have asked over the years and so I drew the assignment to
address the issue-who was the voice of the 1960s. Who or what. Was it the
lunchroom sit-inners and Freedom Riders, what about the hippies (which I
counted myself as one for a time), was it SDS, the various Weather
configurations, acid, rock, folk rock, folk, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Abbie Hoffman,
Grace Slick, hell the Three Js-Joplin, Jimi, Jim as in Morrison and the like.
Or maybe it was a mood, a mood of disenchantment about a world that seemed out
of our control, which seemed to be running without any input from us, without
us even being asked. My candidate, and not my only candidate but a recent NPR Morning Edition segment brought the
question to mind (see above link), is a song, a song created by Bob Dylan in
the early 1960s which was really a clarion call to action on our part, or the
best part of our generation-The Times
They Are A-Changin’.
I am not sure if Bob Dylan
started out with some oversized desire to be the “voice” of his generation. He
certainly blew the whole thing off later after his motorcycle accident and
still later when he became a recluse even if he did 200 shows a year, maybe
sullen introvert is better, actually maybe his own press agent giving out
dribbles is even better but that song, that “anthem” sticks in memory as a
decisive summing up of what I was feeling at the time. (And apparently has
found resonance with a new generation of activists via the March for Our Lives
movement and other youth-driven movements.) As a kid I was antsy to do
something, especially once I saw graphic footage on commercial television of
young black kids being water-hosed, beaten with police clubs and bitten by dogs down in the South simply
for looking for some rough justice in this wicked old world. Those images, and
those of the brave lunch-room sitters and Freedom bus riders were stark and
compelling. They and my disquiet over nuclear bombs which were a lot scarier
then when there were serious confrontations which put them in play and concern
that what bothered me about having no say, about things not being addressed
galvanized me.
The song “spoke to me” as
it might not have earlier or later. It had the hopeful ring of a promise of a
newer world. That didn’t happen or happen in ways that would have helped the
mass of humanity but for that moment I flipped out every time I heard it played
on the radio or on my old vinyl records record-player. Other songs, events,
moods, later would overtake this song’s sentiment but I was there at the
creation. Remember that, please.
***********
Once Again Haunted By The
Question Of Questions-Who Represented The “Voice” Of The Generation Of ’68 When
The Deal Went Down-And No It Was Not One Richard Millstone, Oops, Milhous Nixon
By Seth Garth
I have been haunted
recently by various references to events in the early 1960s brought to mind by
either seeing or hearing those references. First came one out of the blue when
I was in Washington, D.C. on other business and I popped in as is my wont to
the National Gallery of Art to get an “art bump” after fighting the drearies at
the tail-end of the conference that I was attending. I usually enter on the 7th
Street entrance to see what they have new on display on the Ground Floor
exhibition areas. This time there was a small exhibit concerning the victims of
Birmingham Sunday, 1963 the murder by bombing of a well-known black freedom
church in that town and the death of four innocent young black girls and
injuries to others. The show itself was a “what if” by a photographer who
presented photos of what those young people might have looked like had they not
had their precious lives stolen from them by some racist KKK-drenched bastards
who never really did get the justice they deserved. The catch here, the impact
on me, was these murders and another very disturbing viewing on television at
the time, in black and white, of the Birmingham police unleashing dogs, firing
water hoses and using the ubiquitous police billy-clubs to beat down on
peaceful mostly black youth protesting against the pervasive Mister James Crow
system which deprived them of their civil rights.
Those events galvanized me
into action from seemingly out of nowhere. At the time I was in high school, in
an all-white high school in my growing up town of North Adamsville south of
Boston. (That “all white” no mistake despite the nearness to urban Boston since
a recent look at the yearbook for my class showed exactly zero blacks out of a
class of 515. The nearest we got to a black person was a young immigrant from
Lebanon who was a Christian though and was not particularly dark. She, to my
surprise given where she came from, had been a cheer-leader and well-liked
although I only knew her slightly since she was “in” with the social butterfly
crowd which we Acre boys avoided like the plague, or they avoided us take your
pick). I should also confess, for those who don’t know not having read about a
dozen articles I have done over the past
few years in this space, that my “corner boys,” the Irish mostly with a
sprinkling of Italians reflecting the two major ethic groups in the town I hung
around with then never could figure out why I was so concerned about black
people down South when we were living hand to mouth up North. (The vagaries of
time have softened some things among them for example nobody uses the “n” word
which needs no explanation here and which was the “term of art” in reference to
black people then to not prettify what this crowd was about.)
In many ways I think I only
survived by the good graces of Scribe who everybody deferred to on social
matters. Not for any heroic purpose but because Scribe was the key to
intelligence about what girls were interested in what guys, who was “going”
steady, etc. a human grapevine who nobody crossed without suffering exile. What
was “heroic” if that can be used in this context was that as a result of those
Birmingham images back then I travelled over to the NAACP office on
Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to offer my meager services in the civil rights
struggle and headed south to deadly North Carolina one summer on a voting
drive. I was scared but that was that. My guys never knew that was where I went
until many years later long after we had all gotten a better gripe via the U.S.
Army and other situations on the question of race and were amazed that I had
done that.
The other recent occurrence
that has added fuel to the fire was a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where they deal with aspects of what amounts to the
American Songbook. The segment dealt with the generational influence of
folk-singer songwriter Bob Dylan’s The
Times They Are A-Changin’ as an anthem for our generation (and its revival
of late in newer social movements like the kids getting scared out of their wits
with guns running amok and getting serious about gun control). No question for
those who came of political age early in the 1960s before all hell broke loose
this was a definitive summing up song for those of us who were seeking what
Bobby Kennedy would later quoting a line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson
call “seeking a newer world.” In one song was summed up what we thought about
obtuse indifferent authority figures, the status quo, our clueless parents, the
social struggles that were defining us and a certain hurried-ness to get to
wherever we thought we were going.
I mentioned in that
previous commentary that given his subsequent trajectory while Bob Dylan may
have wanted to be the reincarnation Plus of Woody Guthrie (which by his long life
he can rightly claim) whether he wanted to be, could be, the voice of the
Generation of ’68 was problematic. What drove me, is driving me a little crazy
is who or what some fifty plus years after all the explosions represented the
best of what we had started out to achieve (and were essentially militarily
defeated by the ensuing reaction before we could achieve most of it) in those
lonely high school halls and college dormitories staying up late at night
worrying about the world and our place in the sun.
For a long time, probably
far longer than was sensible I believed that it was somebody like Jim Morrison,
shaman-like leader of the Doors, who came out of the West Coast winds and
headed to our heads in the East. Not Dylan, although he was harbinger of what
was to come later in the decade as rock reassembled itself in new garb after
some vanilla music hiatus but somebody who embodied the new sensibility that
Dylan had unleashed. The real nut though was that I, and not me alone, and not
my communal brethren alone either, was the idea that we possessed again
probably way past it use by date was that “music was the revolution” by that
meaning nothing but the general lifestyle changes through the decade so that
the combination of “dropping out” of nine to five society, dope in its many
manifestations, kindnesses, good thought and the rapidly evolving music would
carry us over the finish line. Guys like Josh Breslin and the late Pete Markin,
hard political guys as well as rabid music lovers and dopers, used to laugh at
me when I even mentioned that I was held in that sway especially when ebb tide
of the counter-cultural movement hit in Nixon times and the bastinado was as
likely to be our home as the new Garden. Still Jim Morrison as the “new man”
(new human in today speak) made a lot of sense to me although when he fell down
like many others to the lure of the dope I started reappraising some of my
ideas -worried about that bastinado fate.
So I’ll be damned right now
if I could tell you that we had such a voice, and maybe that was the problem,
or a problem which has left us some fifty years later without a good answer.
Which only means for others to chime in with their thoughts on this
matter.
